


Riverdale Metas

by deandratb



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:35:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23340310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deandratb/pseuds/deandratb
Summary: Thoughts on Riverdale, copied from my blog for safekeeping here.
Relationships: Alice Cooper/FP Jones II, Fred Andrews & FP Jones II
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. Alice's Isolation After S2 and the Farm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts on why Alice was an easy Farm target.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On my blog [here.](https://actuallylorelaigilmore.tumblr.com/post/182267007125/thanks-to-a-conversation-with-declermontdiana-im)

thanks to a conversation with [@declermontdiana](https://tmblr.co/m1gdVammk95hbq4azZBjdcw) i’m now thinking about the end of riverdale s2 and where all the characters were at after the chaos in town and the black hood reveal, and i think it’s time to talk about the fact that alice was perfectly positioned to be pulled into a cult.

because while she was vulnerable to the farm because of how traumatized she was, i’ve never seen a discussion of the way that she was also incredibly, horribly alone in the face of nearly being murdered by her husband and finding out he was the source of the town’s terror for all that time.

yes, we know that betty was trying to look after her, but not being able to pull herself together around betty could only have added ‘i suck as a mom’ feelings to alice’s emotional problems in the immediate aftermath. despite what betty thinks because she’s spent her life trying to be everything to everyone, alice would actually be a worse parent if she were using betty for friendship and emotional support, because that shouldn’t be her teenage daughter’s role.

and yes, polly also came and offered her support and potential help. but despite being a mom already, polly is her teenage daughter too, who she shouldn’t expect to lean on, so it makes sense that alice would be more likely to throw all her trust in with the adults in the cult that polly eased her into.

but why, after everything she had been through, would she decide to trust and get help from total strangers? we focus so much on the fact that she was an easy target, like her instability after hal and fake-charles and even polly is the only factor. but alice’s openness to the cult because of what happened to her is just part of it–the world around her matters too.

and the reality of it is that alice let the farm become her most trusted support system **because** **nobody else was there for her.**

alice doesn’t have a single female friend in riverdale. though she and sierra probably have the least antagonistic dynamic, that doesn’t make them friends…and hermione, mary, and penelope make it very clear how they feel about her. obviously there are valid reasons why she’s not well-liked, but having made more enemies than friends doesn’t change the fact that alice is a mess after hal and in need of sympathy and support.

arguably, the two people in town who you’d most expect might care about how alice is doing after she’s nearly strangled to death by her husband are fp and fred. with fp, there’s all the history and obvious feelings that s3 showed us were still there even after their affair ended…and fred has both known her forever and is a genuinely nice guy. he may snark back when alice is being a jerk about archie, but it’s hard for me to believe that he wouldn’t check in on his next door neighbor who’s just been through a tragedy.

however, that’s where the events of s2 really conspire to leave alice totally isolated. fp’s son is in the hospital barely alive, and fp dove into a losing fight with a rival gang–he’s in no shape to immediately rush to her side, even once word does reach him about hal. meanwhile, fred was hal’s first victim. he nearly died thanks to alice’s husband, which i imagine would make it hard to offer her unsolicited support, even though fred assures betty she’s not to blame when it comes up.

now personally for the sake of human decency, i think it’s totally crappy that alice was left alone in that house to suffer. i don’t care how little she was liked in town, anybody who’s nearly murdered should get checked on by someone. but as far as we’re aware, that doesn’t happen. after hal tries to kill alice, the only people who come to her door are reporters looking for more scandal. _(you could argue that this part is a twisted kind of karma given how often alice’s reporting reveled in others’ pain, but that shouldn’t mean she’s also without other visitors.)_

when you really think about it in context, alice and the farm make even less sense. the last thing alice cooper should want to do is trust a stranger just because her daughter vouches for him–the last time she did that, she had to bleach her whole kitchen! and by the end of s2, she’s found out that she can’t trust the last twenty years of her life, the most intimate partner she had, or her own judgement.

only desperation can explain her throwing herself into the arms of polly’s new friends, when she must have the worst trust issues she’s ever had in her life.

but honestly, of course she’s desperate. her entire carefully-crafted life unraveled a piece at a time over the last three years. she lost her older daughter to the blossoms, her younger daughter to the serpents, her husband to madness or evil or both depending on how you look at it, her credibility at her job once her history was revealed, and her rekindling with fp because they’re both idiots who can’t get it together. she wasn’t even left with a shred of normalcy–or the facade of it that made her life worthwhile before.

alice smith became alice cooper who reinvented herself again and again once things started falling apart, and it’s not clear if even she knows who she really is deep down. so she’s heading fast toward middle age, with very little to show for it, living in a house full of ruined memories with no one to talk to, and no reason to believe any of the other adults in riverdale would be there for her if she did reach out.

in the aftermath, all she has is one daughter she didn’t protect from her own father, who she never knows how to save…and another who’s offering her hope.

it’s terrible that she took it, as is everything alice has done since the farm became the center of her world. i don’t know anyone who’s blindly trying to defend her s3 behavior, or who isn’t expecting an awful reckoning someday.

but at the same time, of **course** she accepted the help that edgar evernever was reaching out to her, during the absolute lowest period in her life.

he was the only one who offered.


	2. Fred Andrews, Bi Disaster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts on the bi disaster that is Fred.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On my blog [here.](https://actuallylorelaigilmore.tumblr.com/post/180074421080/fred-andrews-disaster-bi-loves-flannel-builds)

## FRED ANDREWS, DISASTER BI:

  * loves flannel, builds things
  * always ready to strip down with his Platonic Male Pals
  * so loyal it hurts
  * comes thisclose to flirting with his teenage son’s teacher/sex friend
  * named a band after himself
  * took his estranged wife to their homecoming reunion alongside the woman he technically cheated on her with
  * awkward dad but never stops trying
  * LARPed around his high school in the dark
  * fixed up a vw bus in the 90s and called it the shaggin wagon
  * 100% willing to share any and all food
  * kissed a sad pregnant girl then lived next door to her as an adult
  * won’t stop getting shot




	3. Twisted Branches of the Blossom Family Tree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts on how Nana Rose's history meant Blossom loyalty led to murder even before Jason.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On my blog [here.](https://actuallylorelaigilmore.tumblr.com/post/180071482390/its-really-disturbing-that-if-you-think-it)

it’s really disturbing that if you think it through, jason wasn’t the first murder in the name of blossom family loyalty. 

after hal’s grandfather killed clifford’s grandfather and became a cooper, hal’s father was blackmailed over it and murdered four people to keep the secret. but one boy escaped, so hal manipulated him into blaming an innocent man, and the scapegoat was murdered to close the case. everyone moved on. 

when we’re done detangling the history throughout s2, we know that betty’s father murdered multiple people, her grandfather murdered the conways and then was part of the group that murdered the scapegoat, and her great-grandfather murdered his own brother.

but betty and jughead learn some of the details from nana rose, the only woman in that posse, who was clifford’s mother and therefore the daughter of the man murdered by hal’s grandfather.

when she helped hunt an innocent man, she was doing so side by side with the cousin whose father murdered hers and helping to protect her father’s killer. their families were locked in a vicious blood feud, but she still joined the group that protected the former blossom heir and preserved their twisted history.

i thought hiram’s obsession with family loyalty was bad but honestly? at this point i’m just glad cheryl’s still alive.


	4. Headcanons Based On The Midnight Clib

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts on Riverdale parents, resulting from the Midnight Club episode.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On my blog [here.](https://actuallylorelaigilmore.tumblr.com/post/180069439700/parentdale-headcanons-that-ill-never-use-but-now)

parentdale headcanons that i’ll never use but now have thanks to the midnight club:

  * sierra and mary were friends who wanted to share an apartment one day while they studied to be lawyers. 
  * alice taught herself to play the keyboard while she was hiding out at school to avoid her house. 
  * hermione was the mom friend in her group who always knew exactly what to do when someone needed help.
  * penelope was meant to be a virgin bride for clifford and the nuns taught that sex was sin, so she ignored her urges. especially around sierra.
  * fred helped fp even after the business suffered because the medical bills fp was trying to pay for his father reminded fred of his own dad’s death.
  * alice was the result of an affair with a prominent northsider who refused to publicly claim her, leaving alice welcome in neither world.
  * tom wrote sierra letters after graduation, but he wasn’t surprised when she met myles in a club and stopped writing back. 
  * penelope had a crush on hal for years, secretly finding him the more appealing blossom descendant. she never thought alice deserved him.
  * hermione eloped with hiram as soon as it was legal, and let his family replace hers.
  * nobody ever had sex with fred in the shaggin wagon. except possibly fp.




	5. How The Midnight Club Changed Our Understanding Of Falice Canon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts on the Midnight Club episode and what it taught us about FP's past and his history with Alice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On my blog [here.](https://actuallylorelaigilmore.tumblr.com/post/180087188990/fp-alice-aka-how-all-my-hcs-were-wrong-and-i)

# FP & ALICE, AKA HOW ALL MY HCS WERE WRONG AND I LEARNED TO LOVE THE MIDNIGHT CLUB

okay so i know that 3x04 messed up a lot of headcanons _(or at least it messed up mine)_ but one of the things that fascinates me about this mess of a show is that it loves unreliable narrators and changing canon not just through blatant inconsistency but also by sleight of hand. 

so, we find out alice had a son in high school, but gave him up for adoption. then we learn he wasn’t her son with hal because chic doesn’t have blossom blood. then, despite alice’s insistence that there’s no way he could be fp’s son, she rushes to tell fp that charles was his, once she learns charles died. 

but who said charles died? chic, who can’t be trusted. and a motel neighbor who saw suspicious things and drew conclusions. _(until i see a body on this show i believe nothing. speaking of, where’s chic buried?)_

because of the twists of s2 i honestly believed that alice had a son she thought was hal’s but might be fp’s, who she decided was fp’s because of the blood test results–but since chic wasn’t charles, the blood test was meaningless. so i never understood her sudden certainty in telling fp about their baby after chic’s lies had been revealed.

s3′s flashbacks destroyed all my attempts to write between that wobbly narrative, to square the circles of alice being with both boys and fp knowing nothing and hal suspecting but never calling her out on the baby not being his. as pissed as i was at 3x04 for that, for all the mental rewriting i’ve had to do and how much it changes my ideas of character motivations, it really just clarified things that were always being hinted at. and it did so consistently. 

that’s the thing about riverdale that i’m more and more certain of _(when it comes to my faves, at least. don’t ask me about archie. i’m 100% convinced that his time in juvie is just an elaborate setup to give the vixens an excuse to perform ‘jailhouse rock’ and you can all fight me. though that’s a bop.)_

the show likes to double back, change its story, make you think you know things, and then change again. but a lot of times, when it does that you can go back and rewatch and see that the original ideas you had, that came from canon, they weren’t wrong for what you knew then…all that original canon just meant something different and you didn’t know it until now.

**so, let’s talk about alice and fp, aka the reason i’m here.**

here’s the first thing we learned in 3x04 that we didn’t know before: fp’s father was the one pushing him to be a serpent, and fp was fighting against that. it was implied that that history went the other way–though the idea that fp’s father was an abusive ass doesn’t surprise me at all. really though, we knew nothing about jughead’s grandfather, other than a total lack of relationship we could see. after all, if his father’s father was a serpent and he’d grown up around the guy, jughead could have gone to him for serpent history in s2.

however, i don’t think this was actually an inconsistency. people are talking about it like it is, like the show told us fp was thrown out and joined the serpents and became the man he is, and so canon’s been fucked with, but i don’t see where. here’s what fp actually tells jughead about why it’s so important to him that jug go to college rather than be a serpent:

> _You know, when I was 16, my old man kicked me out and told me to go to hell. Instead, I joined the Serpents. And then the army, and then back again._

the midnight club formed at the beginning of their junior year, and we know alice was telling hal she was having his baby by homecoming. so all the events of 3x04 happened early in their junior year. what if fp had a birthday in late august and got pushed into a later school year, like a childhood friend of mine? he would turn sixteen right before junior year and then not turn seventeen until right before they were all seniors, turning eighteen after graduation.

if that was the case, then he would’ve been sixteen when he refused to join the serpents. he would’ve been sixteen when his father broke his arm, and when the midnight club took over his nights. when they all went their separate ways, alice going after hal and seeing fp becoming a serpent from a distance? he was still sixteen, even if she and the others were mostly seventeen already. 

that makes it totally possible that what fp was telling jughead was true, but impossible to understand correctly without knowing what fp’s life was like at that age. his father threw him out at 16–junior year–because he refused to follow in the man’s serpent footsteps. instead, he insisted on trying for college and being an athlete and making more of himself. it’s even possible that since he was already pretending to live on elm, fp just continued scraping by after getting kicked out, crashing on couches and ‘figuring it out’ like his son would years later. maybe he hoped that he could keep it up until graduation. 

but then featherhead happened, and they all scattered and ran from who they were. alice’s narration implies that it was the end of the midnight club, and their shared horrible secret, that led to everyone’s decisions that followed, including fp giving up his dreams and putting on the jacket. so it’s possible that fp was telling jughead his story, but leaving that part out. his dad kicked him out _(for refusing to be a serpent)_ and then he joined the serpents _(getting a new family, plus his old family back)_ , and then he left for the army thinking **that** could be his way out, only when he returned nothing had changed.

no wonder he wanted a different life for his son!! and no fucking wonder he’s so bitter toward alice for thinking she can be anything other than a serpent–not only did she get out when he couldn’t, but she tried to sabotage him and hated him for trying, back when he still had a chance.

the only other comment I could find fp making about his own serpent history is in the same episode, when he tells the whyte wyrm crowd, _‘I’ve been in and out of the Serpents since I was younger than my son.’_

that always confused me, because fp said in the same episode that he joined at 16, and a few months before archie wasn’t old enough for a driver’s license yet so how old could jughead really be? i thought maybe fp associating with serpents before he joined was part of what got him thrown out by his dad. but instead, now i’m thinking that since jughead had a winter birthday in s1, he should be about to turn 17 when fp says that in s2. which tracks, if fp joined when he was barely 16 and a junior.

_(granted this whole timeline is a mess for the next gen riverdale kids so i’m mostly not touching that. yikes. but for fp, it could actually make sense.)_

the other important part of what we learned about fp is that we learned it all from alice. back when it was happening, she knew about his serpent family ties, and that he was pretending to be a northsider…but by her own admission, they all avoided each other after featherhead. that includes her and fp since she was pregnant, would be leaving for the sisters sometime after homecoming, and he was busy joining the gang and drinking with his dad, falling right into the future she predicted for him.

so she isn’t telling betty anything about fp actually becoming a serpent. just that he wasn’t, and then sometime after their club disbanded he was, while she was busy with hal. the specifics about when and how and his treatment by his father outside of what we see? still a mystery. 

for the record, i’m proceeding as though we can trust alice’s storytelling, even though there’s no guarantee of anything on riverdale. mainly because they’d have little reason to have created the whole flashback episode unless they wanted most or all of it to become part of canon. also because there were private moments not involving alice, events meant for the viewers and not just as her take on their past.

somewhere between the story coming from alice’s best memory and fp dropping early hints based off his own alcohol-washed recollections we got discrepancies like the fred heads playing for the midnight club junior year, when supposedly fred didn’t create the band until senior year. perspective is key, especially when you can’t trust the show to be a detached guide.

but in the meantime, this got way longer than expected…so it’s a series now! part 2 featuring alice will arrive soon. 


	6. Riverdale Moms and Their Legacies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts on the mothers and daughters of Riverdale, and their intertwined fates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On my blog [here.](https://actuallylorelaigilmore.tumblr.com/post/180055399520/the-riverdale-moms-are-fascinating-to-me-because)

## THE RIVERDALE MOMS ARE FASCINATING TO ME BECAUSE ALL OF THEM MADE CHOICES AS TEENAGERS THAT WOULD DEFINE NOT JUST THEIR LIVES BUT THE FATES OF THEIR DAUGHTERS, TOO.

**hermione** wanted more than the life she was born into, and she was willing to work for it–but not the way her mother had, endless work with nothing to show for it. she wanted better. and when she had a daughter, hermione gave her the life she wanted as a girl: she raised her to be passionate and fierce and smart…along with every material comfort veronica could ever wish for. 

**alice** wanted a life that was safe and controlled, where her children wouldn’t be raised in a poor neighborhood full of crime and gangs. where they would never be called a bastard child of trash, like she was. she sacrificed one child to give that to the others, but when she had her daughters, they grew up safe and settled with impeccable reputations.

**sierra** wanted change and power and more than her small town home could ever provide–not to mention the freedom to love the boy who held her heart, no matter their differences. she got out of riverdale and watched the world change around her, met a man who was much more socially acceptable, and had a daughter who inherited their shared love of music.

**penelope** wanted a happy life with a real family, one that would love her unconditionally. but since her choice was no family at all or the blossoms, she chose a future where she would be looked after as long as she continued their legacy. she prepared her twins to continue the family line, and made sure they knew that being a blossom was the best gift they could ever have received.

## THE PROBLEM IS, ALL THE GIRLS WERE DOOMED BY THEIR MOTHERS, IN SPITE AND BECAUSE OF THEIR BEST INTENTIONS.

hermione wanted her daughter to have everything, but **veronica** just wants the freedom to choose her own loyalties. because of the family she was born into, that’s the one thing she can’t never have. but hermione passed down all the other traits she needed: determination, pride, savvy, strength. the daughter of hiram and hermione was only ever supposed to respect one rule, family first…and because veronica is their daughter she can never give up the fight.

alice wanted her daughters to have a future full of success and safety. her rebellious spirit and ruthless decisions meant she got to hand them that…but **polly** got pregnant and **betty** chose the serpents in an attempt to escape alice’s control. her obsession with perfection was a need to keep them from repeating her mistakes, but she was living a lie to preserve their life in the first place so betty and polly never knew their mom had a past worth avoiding. 

sierra wanted her daughter to have fame and talent and control over her career, far outside the big city that wouldn’t let her into the upper echelons of politics. but in giving **josie** an impressive musical heritage and the attitude to stay strong in the face of discrimination, sierra also gave her daughter a father who will never be impressed by her talents and a tendency to push people away because her dreams always have to come first. 

penelope’s story is the hardest and saddest for me, because she just wanted a life that wasn’t at the sisters of quiet mercy, and i honestly don’t think she saw a way to strike out alone after graduation. how would she know what that could look like? her only models were thornhill or the orphanage. who knows if she wanted kids, let alone thought about them when choosing her own fate. but when she did have children, her son was murdered for defying the family and her daughter twisted herself into a monster for years to be what they wanted. when **cheryl** finally stands up for herself, she is sent to the same orphanage that made her mother grateful to be a blossom, because apparently a broken girl is better than one who might reject her duty.


End file.
